Will China Run Out Of Water?

I don't think there are any refugees," said Liu Ning of China's Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters at the end of last month, denying media reports of people leaving their villages in areas stricken by extreme drought.

The senior official is obviously uninformed. Five thousand inhabitants of Nanhua country in Yunnan Province had no choice but to leave their homes in mountainous areas and set up camp near streams in a lowland region. In Guangxi, those who can leave do so. Reporters from Hong Kong's South China Morning Post saw villages "abandoned" by the young and middle-aged, leaving children and the elderly behind.

The worst water shortage in more than a century has hit the country's southwest, in Guizhou and Sichuan provinces in addition to Yunnan and Guangxi. Also badly affected has been Chongqing, a city the size of Belgium. In the north Ningxia, Shanxi, Hebei and Gansu are drought-stricken. The flow from the source of the Pearl River, which empties into the South China Sea near Hong Kong and Macau, has been reduced to a trickle from a waterfall. China is, in a word, parched.

Conditions in some areas of the southwest are horrifying. Chen Guihua, a peasant, and her parents-in-law, both in their 60s, walk more than 5 and a half miles most days--over two mountain ridges--for two buckets of drinking water. For more than three months they have not brushed their teeth or taken a shower. Now conditions are getting even worse.

In Chen's village of Nongmei in Guangxi, the land this year is too dry for spring planting. Livestock has perished from thirst. Animals have also starved to death because villagers, for eight months, have eaten the plants in the wild after crops withered in the field. In Nongtai, a nearby village, elderly residents knelt before county officials pleading for drinking water so they would not die.

Other Chinese citizens are not so submissive. In February 300 peasants stormed a township government building in Hengshishui in Guangdong Province over a plan by local officials to divert water to another area. Fights among farmers for water are now common in the southwest, and soaring food prices in Yunnan are leading to concerns about social unrest.

Why are conditions so dry throughout the country? Is it because China has 22% of the world's population but only 7% of its fresh water? No. This imbalance has existed for hundreds of years. Defenders of the government also point to climate change, yet the People's Republic is not the only nation affected by shifting weather patterns.

Dry conditions plague China primarily because of decisions made in Beijing. "The drought isn't a natural disaster but a man-made calamity," writes Zheng Fengtian of Remin University.

At its most fundamental level, Chinese officials, from Mao Zedong to the present, have sought to overpower nature rather than work with it. The environmental problems we see today, and especially those related to water, are the result of 60 years of exceedingly bad official acts. For instance, Zheng notes that China's local governments love large-scale flood control and hydroelectric projects and ignore smaller-scale efforts to improve irrigation and provide drinking water.

Beijing suffers from the same disease. While central government officials devoted great sums to grandiose projects, they ignored the country's reservoirs and water utilities in the countryside. Of the country's 87,000 reservoirs that had been built by 2007 43% were in disrepair. Money allocated for water projects goes missing, much of it embezzled.

The repeated failures of officialdom are creating a tragedy. More than 400 of China's 655 cities lack sufficient water. There are almost 200 million unnecessary illnesses and 60,000 unnatural deaths due to water problems.

Those problems are becoming more evident in recent years. The Yellow River, China's second longest, has dried up since the early 1970s. It ran dry every year in the 1990s but one. Since then the government has remedied the situation by releasing water from reservoirs, but that has only masked conditions. The outflow of the river is about 10% of what it was in the 1940s. Today, the Yangtze, the country's longest, also dries up in spots.

Rivers are dry, and deserts advance from the north. Today they now cover more than 27% of the country's land. The figure increases each year as the sands move south, both in the eastern and western portions of the country. This relentless process has seen China's deserts merge as they swallow up more precious land.

Some of that precious land--quite a lot of it, in fact--is sinking under its own weight. A depression of about 25,000 square miles, in the shape of a funnel, is forming in North China, due to excessive usage of subterranean water. Parts of Shanghai, Taiyuan and Tianjin have dropped by more than 6 feet for the same reason.

A few summers ago the Science and Technology Ministry warned, "The water resources crisis even threatens the future survival of the Chinese nation." If anything, things have gotten worse since then. Central government policies are leading the Chinese state to an ecological disaster for which there is no remedy.

I lived and worked in Shanghai and Hong Kong for almost two decades and now write primarily on China, Asia, and nuclear proliferation. I am the author of two Random House books, The Coming Collapse of China and Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World. My writings h...